


Here's Hoping

by tessdebelle



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: 4x14, F/M, What Could Have Been, somewhat anti andrew garner
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-15
Updated: 2017-02-15
Packaged: 2018-09-24 14:26:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9759638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tessdebelle/pseuds/tessdebelle
Summary: “Well, let me know if it goes horribly. Here’s hoping.”If that date went wrong, and what went right because of it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Credit to elle-you-oh for little Peggy.

_“Well, let me know if it goes horribly. Here’s hoping.”_

It went horribly.

Andrew was fine, but not Melinda’s type. He asked too many questions about her and about her job, and she was slowly growing to realize she didn’t want to date a civilian, and she didn’t want to keep dating around – she wanted the man who had been a constant since their first op together, the one who she’d doubted at first since he’d come from operations but slowly had grown to love, to be her best friend.

* * *

 

After her date, Coulson had called her up, asking how it went and she could hear by the tone in his voice he tried to hide a sincere desire to hear that it didn’t. After she told him she wasn’t intending on a second date, he asked her to dinner.

Not drinks. A real dinner, just the two of them, where she wore a skirt for the first time in years (Maria had told her that leggings and a SHIELD T-shirt weren’t appropriate for a first date with her best friend, and the skirt had been worth the look he’d given her legs on that date) and he’d foregone a tie.

That date had been the best one she’d ever been on, and the last.

Of course it hadn’t been good. Coulson had spilled spaghetti onto his pants, and the waiter had forgotten about Melinda’s meal, and he walked back with her apologizing and saying he understood if she felt they’d made a mistake and she kissed him, mostly to get him to shut up. She became Melinda and he became Phil, and they were rarely seen apart both on missions and off.

They got married two years later.

It was a small ceremony. Fury grumbled about rules and regulations but since Phil was his favorite he let it slide, buying them a lamp to decorate their new house. They still went on ops and attempted to remain professional on them, even taking off their wedding bands, but there were some slip-ups; a running joke with their fellow agents was how Phil had once called her ‘Lin’ on coms, and no one else was allowed to call her that.

They both wanted kids, and after long paperwork from SHIELD and trying to figure out how they would balance being parents and being agents (lots of time spent doing paperwork, but it would be worth it).  

A few years later came an op in Bahrain, and when Melinda insisted on going in, Phil followed after her. The two of them fought and came out covered in blood. Phil held her as she’d shot the little girl who wanted their pain, and assured her as he held her she had done the right thing – that if she hadn’t done it, he wouldn’t have her there.

They spent the next few weeks recovering. Melinda was in pain but he refused to let her push him away, and thankfully it wasn’t squarely on his shoulders; he had so much guilt, both for the girl and because he should have been the one to take that final shot so Melinda didn’t have to. They went to a SHIELD psychologist who helped them both out to deal with their guilt and that they could still be parents even with the knowledge that they’d killed a child.

Phil and Melinda were both still recovering when Melinda told him she was pregnant. He was shocked, not expecting it, but they were both ecstatic despite the fears they had of being parents, and because Melinda was so much more quiet, and Phil had hardened over the years from losing good agents and helping keep his wife together after Bahrain.

Once their daughter was born, though, neither of them were afraid. Margaret Stephanie Coulson weighed exactly six pounds and was completely perfect. She had her mother’s eyes and Phil said she was perfect because she looked exactly like Melinda, but she was pretty sure little Peggy had Phil’s dorky smile.

Peggy was incredibly loved, even though her parents at times had trouble being there. Her father read her stories about Captain America, and her mother would roll her eyes and watch the two of them. For the first year after Peggy was born, both her parents worked almost exclusively out of the field to take care of Peggy, with Melinda strictly as an SO and Phil teaching a class at the Academy. They both reluctantly went into the field, but when Peggy was four years old, it turned out to be a mistake.

Melinda had had to tell their daughter that her father wasn’t coming home. Clint and Natasha, Peggy’s godparents, took care of their daughter while Melinda grieved for three days straight, fighting to figure out how to take care of a five-year-old without her husband. She got the call from Fury at two am, telling her she had to come to a secret base and he was sending a plane and she had no choice. Melinda came and was told that her husband was alive; but he might never be the same and she could never tell him what really happened, that there was alien blood running through his veins keeping him alive.

Phil was back and Melinda could tell something had changed about her husband after his death, he was somehow less cautious than he’d once been, but he was the same at home. They started a team with several younger agents, and left on the weekends to go where their daughter was staying with her Grandmother who spoiled her rotten.

Their team started suspecting something was off and thought they were hiding something, and the young hacker on the team ended up following them home to find a little girl who looked oddly like her. Six-year-old Peggy idolized Skye and soon wanted to be her, and Skye liked having someone who looked up to her and was reminded of her time in foster care when she’d been around little kids.

Things went smoothly until Phil found out his wife was reporting on him to Fury. He was beside himself with anger, and Melinda left, spending a few days with her daughter while she tracked down who was in charge of the TAHITI project. She’d known he was working on something big, but they were both good at keeping information from each other when it was required. She returned, daughter in tow, and told Phil how he had been the one in charge of the project. But he no longer cared – he knew Melinda had done what she could for him and he loved her for that. The three of them fell asleep together in a bed in the motel they were staying at, living to fight another day.


End file.
